Haven't I heard/seen you before?

Over the past three months, I've spent a great deal of time on the phone with Verizon.

Don't ask.

The point is, if you spend a great deal of time on the phone with Verizon, you become very familiar with their hold music.  You can whistle it, you can hum it, and it inserts itself into a teeny, tiny cubby in your brain attic, a place so small you don't even know it's there.

Until one day when a Shop-Rite commercial comes on and you're watching this thing and you're thinking, "what is it about this spot that's so freaking familiar," and it's driving you crazy and then you realize it's the Verizon hold music on the Shop-Rite commercial.

And that doesn't make it any better, but at least you know it's not going to drive you crazy every time you see the damn thing.

Which brings me to the point of this post, borrowed interest in advertising.  Really, copying and ripping off creative in advertising, but honestly, whats the difference?

If you were creating a commercial, and you decided to use an existing piece of music, wouldn't you check to see if that piece of music had been licensed for use in advertising before?  Especially for a product that is directly competitive to yours?

I would.

So it always drives me crazy when I see something like this:

This spot aired early last year.  Directed by Adrien Brody, it is a modern look at the golden era of motoring and automotive design, as seen through the lens of the Chrysler corporation.

Beautifully done.  Nice job, guys.

And how about that track?  Hauntingly beautiful, right?

Right.

And it was even more hauntingly beautiful the first time I heard it, in 2000, in this Volkswagen ad:

 

This Dante Ariola gem is one of my favorite commercials.  One line of dialogue, no AVO, pure storytelling.  It is the song (One Million Miles Away by J. Ralph) that makes this spot eminently watchable, for me anyway.   And although the Chrysler spot is a really nice piece of work, I'd pick this one over that one any day.

So what gives?  Did the Chrysler agency think we'd never seen the VW ad and thus wouldn't know?  Or that we wouldn't remember this extremely memorable track?  Perhaps they believe that the statute of limitations on our memory is only around 10 years or so.

This happens a lot.

In 2002, Lincoln started using a jazzy tune called Get a Move On in their Navigator spots.  The first time I saw one I thought  "...Isn't that the song from that Volvo ad, the one where the Dad is racing back and forth from the pool to the soccer field?  And didn't Sam Bayer direct that in 1995?"

And lo and behold, it was true.

 

 

Granted, probably ninety nine percent of the population who view these ads will never know that either song was ever used in another commercial at all, let alone one for a competitive product.  Only ad schmucks like me see a spot like this and know exactly where and when the borrowed interest comes from.

 

If I worked on Lincoln or Chrysler, it would always bother me that regardless of how old the original ads are, it wasn't our idea first to use those songs in a car spot, and that even with that knowledge, we still couldn't come up with music that worked just as well, or better.

But it's not just car ads.  Oh no.

In 2005 a man picks up a smooth stone on the beach... it's a Motorola phone.

Five years later, a man picks up a smooth stone on a beach... surprise, it's an HTC phone.

The HTC ad says

"Every idea we have begins with you." 

But what I think the copywriter meant to say was

"Most ideas we have begin with you, but some others begin with a Motorola commercial."

Man rides motorcycle down country road in Academy Award winning film:

I'm looking off to one side, wearing aviator glasses, with one hand on my knee.

Man rides motorcycle down country road in 2009 commercial:

No, I'm looking off to one side, wearing aviator glasses with one hand on my knee!

I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with this, but I think I do happen to notice it more than most others.

I think my friend Dave Tutin put it best:

"...when an industry gets rid of all its senior people - either by natural retirement or firings or promoting them away from the actual work, then the new wave of "leaders" are free to claim recycled ideas as their own because there's really nobody to challenge them. Well, there is but most just cannot be bothered."

I understand how difficult it is to come up with a truly original idea, and I know that this industry we work in is the stuff of borrowed interest anyway.  But for me, the "no one will know or remember" reasoning is lame.

Because some people do remember.

And somebody will always know.